Thursday, 24 March 2016

Facebook takes action against profile identity-theft

Imagine
this happening to you: you log onto Facebook and you see someone else,
with your name and photo. The person is pretending to be you. Pretty
creepy, right? What would you even do about it?

While stuff
like this does happen, its not something that affects a lot of users.
Right now, though, Facebook has been making a big effort to crack down
on hate speech and harassment, so the company is taking action to stop
this kind of identity-theft.

For the last few months the
company has been working on a new feature which will automatically alert
users if someone is trying to impersonate them, according to a report
from Mashable on Thursday.

If such a thing occurs, the user will
get an alert, and will be allowed to tell Facebook if that other
account is actually impersonating them or not.

Facebook first began testing this in November, and it will soon be available to everybody.

This
does not seem to be a very widespread problem; according to Facebook in
its 10-K filing from earlier this year, said that duplicate accounts,
which it called "an account that a user maintains in addition to his or
her principal account" made up less than 5 percent of the company's 1.55
billion MAUs. (By the way, that would equal 75 million accounts at the
high end. That's how many users Facebook has)

It also said there
were less than 2 percent of what it called "false" accounts, meaning
either those that are misclassified, like personal pages for businesses,
and "undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we
determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of
service, such as spamming."

The percentage of accounts that are duplicate or false is higher in developing markets, such as India and Turkey.

So
why tackle such a seemingly small problem like this? Because Facebook
has been under fire lately to curb hate speech on the platform, and to
up its anti-harassment features, especially in the wake of the Syrian
refugee crisis, which led to heated rhetoric on the site.

Late
last year, Facebook, Google, Twitter all agreed to delete hate speech
that violates German laws from their websites within 24 hours, following
an investigation into Facebook by the Germany government over whether
or not Facebook had failed to remove hate speech.

The new
agreement made it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate
speech by creating specialist teams to deal with these incidents at the
three companies.

In January Facebook launched a new anti-hate
speech initiative in Europe and pledged over 1 million euros (or $1.09
million) to support non-governmental organizations in their efforts to
rid its platform of racist and xenophobic posts.

Last month the company began offering incentives to users who stood up to hate speech on the site.

In
addition to the new anti-impersonation feature, Facebook is also said
to be testing out a better way to deal with someone putting up
inappropriate pictures. While nudity on Facebook is already banned
(something that has gotten the company in trouble in the past), the new
feature would give victims of that kind of harassment guides to other
resources they could user, including support groups and legal options.

Keeping
users safe has to be a top priority for social networks, as we've seen
what can happen to a company that gains a reputation for not protecting
its users.

VatorNews reached out to Facebook to confirm these new features. We will update this story if we learn more.